Tidings - Christmas's In's and Out's

Last year, I hit upon the somewhat recessive, but space efficient concept of decorating the  fireplace for yule tide flippancy . The painted fire, a peon to consumerism that was installed, lasted, with some augmenting of gaffer tape for 2014. At the end, it flagged, there were jokes about the fire going out, and the two bar heater. So, the tide had turned, out with the old flames and let the incoming tide be Tidal, and waving, rather than drowning. So, the Christmas tidings , bucolic beachiness and blue sky, fictitious waves, some twitterage via the e-bird and a deluge of gifts, these a tide that went out promptly Christmas Day.  The beachiness remains, the bucket and spade always infra dig.

Green Clocks and Spider Calenders

Like a green clock , this spider orchid shimmies its way centre stage for the first week of December.  There is something beakish in the buds, but opened they fool nicely with the aranas to make another green day.

On the Floral Trail

 Forget fashion's forarys into prints and go direct to the flower.  These two, taking quite different tactics in the art of self propogation were demuring along the bush path from Middle Head to Chowder Bay.At these prices of course they cant last.

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Guavamos!

Obscured by guava leaves, guava flowers, a fine froth of antipetalous stamen, something like apple blossom with guavitude, are lovely finds on the first Tuesday of  December.   The leaf pattern's reticulate loveliness is unexpected extra.

Powerful Owl Service

A fuss from the noisy miners drew my gaze to a tree on the edge of the park next to Balmoral Beach. Too wit, an owl, something red, messy and deceased in its claws, was ignoring the miners' protestations, to stare down the spectators with its one good eye. It seems out of sync with time of day, maybe even with a  slightly hunted aspect, but that is the ambiguity of nature's predators.  The head, strangely small for such a large birdy, gives the odd idea that  the whole thing is a collage of feathers, claws and beak.  Fortune favors the observant.

Making Up Stories for Matrices

Yesterday, strolling to the beach, all at once I came upon a box of golden paperbacks, with a help yourself note.Not one to look a gift horse in the eyes, I pocketed an an old Penguin. on which I will report anon, and for more immediate fun the 1938 school classic, Raven's Progressive Matrices, and duly progressed through them at the beach. Maths being a story told only by number and operation,  the less obvious ones give, albeit brief, moments of mental traction, the pleasure of filling in the story.   This maybe a case of raising Ravens.

Cycadic Motion

Like an aggregated botanical exclamation point, the cycad is emphatically exuberant in putting its best fronds forward. These graphically elegant set are no slouches on speed either, from yesterday to today, the remind that fronds waits for no time. Viola.

Thinking Tools for Hour Glass Days

Like Wordsworth's sister, all at once we came across a host of fluoro digging tools.
What would be par for the beach if  seen in a single pair, this quiet riot of spades and buckets inveigles a disquiet, a singular sense of whimsy whooped up, an idea that this mise en scene is  not so much an invitation to play but an invitation to think: Why? Perhaps it's the first of a sculpture in the sand series, a base camp to look at the dispersion of  toys over time on sand, an invitation to construct a sand glass?

Resolution of the Chicken and the Egg

Falling, or might I say stalking, smack dabbers between those two hoary competitors, the chicken and the egg, the bird and its orbital origin, this one member of a small flock of similarly headless aves, suggest, in the no nonsense stride towards the sand, that maybe we are all a little parochial in our perspective.   Sculptures by the Sea, maybe here is skulkers by the see.

Come in Spinner

Like a visual merry-go round, a reverse of spinning out, this was base camp and summit for one of a set four coast totems from Caterwilliamson and Linda Matthews in Sculpture by the Sea (2104). Bravo, these just might be my favourites for their clever rearrangement of the horizontal plane, spun out into near meaninglessness, then coalesced into a reflected circular and upright image. The naming of t his process, anamorphisis - which makes complete sense once you take it down to its Greek constituents.

Un-Selfie-ing in Lisbon

Perhaps the Cacau Cru mean to pivot on the ambiguity of whether their character is painting himself in or out of the picture but I like to think that this may be discreet advice on the perils of the selfie, a call for modest self-effacement and a certain level of anonymity.

Return to Keirle Park or The Dissolution of Memory

This an overlooked aside from the  Keirle Park series, those once a week sketches in the car, cataloguing the to's and fro's, the oval walkers and dog ball throwers, the skater set, tennis players, aspiring football  teams and slouchy sets of teens who smoked in cockie circles in the furthest corner, all playing second fiddle to the day's slide over into twilight, twilights' slip into the night.  Here, that blur of lightened sky, brighter strokes that give the nod to sunset, the feeling you're in a car, going past, or is it the trees that travel?

Fog Lights Inaction

Saturday doubled up on fog, waking to foghorns, that forlorn long bovine wail that echoes around Sydney Harbour and the foreshores is one of the better variations of Spring. Like in Camelot the morning fog disappears. Usually.  Saturday afternoon saw the fog pawing its way back, grey and misty, sneaking over Middle Head and giving a Mona Lisa moment to the Baths at Balmoral. A string of barely glowing incandescent bulbs suggest that day was done for.

Swept Sticklers for the Deck

Time has turned the deck here into something of a chameleon, an exercise in patience, and repetition, this small pile bought down courtesy of this week's wild wind,  was swept into a neat post card of kindle.  Why this should be pleasing? The sense of time played out in twigs, the tonal graduation?  Perhaps its being an artifact of the act of sweeping itself, a meditation on rhythm, the sussuration of straw on wood.

Postcards from the West Wind

While Tuesday's whirligig wind bought down a whole suit of sticks, it also snipped off these green tips from the parperbark and jacarandah trees, were a kind of message, though I am not sure what, though Marshall McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' seems to fit.

Spilt Drinks - An Opportune Media

In the sort of calibrated beloved of spin doctors,  in the Years of Spilt Drinks, I decided to redefine what was a spill to only those drinks that made it onto the floor, thus taking the pressure off small visitors and small residents who were prone to knock over glasses of  juice and water.   A small spill at the Power House in Brisbane's New Farm provided a substrate to move into a triffid-esque figure, part rock-roll type, bird-footed with some extra feelers and a fine head of water.  The waxy table top and lighting must be given credit, but where is the water guitar when you need it Nigel Kimber?

Models of Discretion

This orchid falls somewhere between being showy and inconspicuous, a state of balance perfectly suitable.

Red Hats To The Rescue

These three women, tribal  in their statement red hats, blue/purple outfits and red shoes, might be an installation of the best kind, a self-organizing fluid, a tribal collective of collectors, nearly antique art savants, friends of a feather, I saw them drift into the Queensland Gallery of Art, and thought aha! the Qld art club's answer to The Triplets of Belleville.Then there is lot near profile of the crowd that has leaked gloriously from the concentrate of prussian blue on the wall.  If this is a club, I would like to apply.

Teepees of LEDs Spells Incandescent

Five teepees of  little movies playing on LEDs create a glade of pleasant nearly strangeness in south side of  Hyde Park. Like coming across fragments of dreams out for a night picnic, some murrmuring quiet stories, another a character in search of adventure, it's hard to pick a favourite, but then favourites always were over-rated.

Wollongong Here I Come !

 

  The kind folk at the Wollongong Writers Festival have invited me to join them,  though I understand that many of my readers in the Ukraine ( hello up there) and United States will find this a bit of a challenge to get there by  12 October 2014 please consider yourself invited.



 12 October 2014 Rocket Readings1:30 pm - 3:30 pm Corner Kembla and Burelli streets WollongongWollongong Art GalleryEvent Organized By: South Coast Writers Centre and Linda Godfrey

Event Details

Rocket Readings is proud to be part of the Wollongong Writers Festival. Join us for a lively afternoon of contemporary poetry readings with featured poets, Carol Jenkins and Joel Ephraims, plus an open mic section. Three minute limit. Hosted by Linda Godfrey.

You can find out more about this Festival at  http://www.wollongongwritersfestival.com/

Champ Chimp Trumps - Cards Up for New Farm

 

Signal boxes are being singled out everywhere as substrates for art installations. This card sharp chimp hails from New Farm, Brisbane's funky south of the city groovy collage of old queenslanders with their wrap around verandahs, the one below movie-set perfect with the vintage Holden ute out front and not a lick of paint for a century I'd say, but still tich in cross-hatched shade up to bull-dozed blocks mushroomining with cheek by cheek apartments.  Mornings out for a run I saw chickens hanging out next to a cafe, and bush turkeys and got swooped out by a pied magpie.  Perfect!

What a Spool Believes

This dervish-esque installation at the Queensland Art Gallery looks nearly better in a photo, the blurring giving it a greater sense of volume, though one misses out on the pleasant machine hum  and faint zephyr produced by the spinning.  I think this is the perfect opportunity to create a sound track, Rose Royce's Car Wash - and surely its a bit rich not to think that her name had been made up for go with the song. The other candidate would be a slight variation of What a Fool Believes .
I am working on a project to retitle Art works, and thereby re-conceive them, which may in all silliness be create a bona vide  new art object. More later.

Wall Masquerading as an anti-hero

This might be a comment on the faceless-ness of crime, an aside on the surveillance state, a deft pun on the stolidity of the superhero paradigm [ha, just tricking, this last option is a complete phoney] or simply a way to get some three-d into street art thingy.  This bandit  in mixed media is lurking in the lane behind Central Park,  where the walls really do have eyes.

Lead Time - Going Nowhere Slowly

Looking around this morning for a missing cable,  in my house jacks and cables are prone to wander, I realised I was experiencing lead time,  that gap where you start doing something but go nowhere while you're searching for the wherewithal.  Much of this is about placement, was it too optimistic to leave ones recording paraphernalia en plein air and expect it to remain there?  This snail, a good example of  the well placed paste up, found in  arrested motion across the road from the excellent White Rabbit Gallery in Chippendale, is more likely to become a palimpsest of weathering than to budge. Perhaps the ink will run, but he does look stoutly waterproof.

Cossie Drama Hits the Rails - Missives to Aqua Alpine Part 4

 Readers may remember that they last time we heard of the Aqua Alpine Cossie Drama Saga was when Lady Murasaki wrote demanding the return of two of her characters.

Since then the following missive has arrived from a hybrid character, Ojii-San Tank Engine , who also sent this selfie.

Dear General Mai Hem,

The consequences of the action of your departed archer are of no relation to I. Last I heard the LOTR costume department was giving him a hard time - 'no, no, even with a life devoted to archery, your shoes suck!'. I pity the man.  He even attempted to persuade them with information on the whereabouts of two characters from a previous set who are still MIA> They didn't have any of it, muttering to each other how easy it was to get a Jenga piece actor these days,

Ojii-San Tank Engine

It might not be rocket science but  I think Oji-San Tank E might be a a non de plume, with a sly reference to Stephenson's famous tanka series of poems in praise of steam.

Also see Parts One and Two

Sighting of a Green Thought

Leura Cascades, plashes in with special lighting effects seemingly an actualistation of Marvel's 'green thought in a green shade'. The crepuscular divisions of sun light, that here have gone someway towards splitting themselves into their constituent wavelengths brings along with it those two arcs of green and green/blue. There is no going past light.

Stella and The Coffee - Katoomba by Starlight

 A weekend of rumbling around the Blue Mountains, walking to cascades and falls, studying fems, including my favourite Gleichenia needs good coffee.  In the dark days good coffee in Katoomba was like a rumour no-one really believed it existed. Enter the small representative of the constellation of Cassiopeia in Lurline Street, lovely coffee, good toast, morning sunshine ( or should I say starlight?) and pleasant coffee fiends to make it all happen with good cheer.  Plus things to sketch!

Budging the Bars - Jailbirds and Bards

 A return to old haunts, to fossick and rake over the small treasures of locale turns up a nice suite of odds and ends, this cryptic image of Mr Budgie, smuggled onto bars, might be a clever comment on who is watching, placed as is it behind both the Newtown Court House and Police Station. Yard and Jail birds apply within.

Aha, This May Explain Why Some Mail Doesn't Make It

This looks like a set up I know, but last week the Postie left this tenuous connection between post box and post, one might say it was a post-hoc or even an ad-hoc arrangement. Is it a message that I need smaller parcels or a bigger letter box?  A vote of confidence in the honesty of all passers-by?  Hang-Mail, Indigestible Literature ? A foot hold doing its best?.This story, non-fiction had least had an ending.

Snow from Nowhere New Years Day 2014

I know I took this photo, it's the falling snow, the way it has snuck in and just keeps drifting down, like a snowdome that never needs shaking that makes me wonder. Like the milk playing rain in the puddles and dance scene in Singing in The Rain, this seems like a kind a trick.  A variety of the ghosts one finds in phones.

Hakuba, Japan

A Fairy Tale With Three Rabbits

Three shadow rabbits, one shadow grandma, heads only, and a fine Japanese bowl, the world writ small. The bowl, by way of Kyoto, is reminiscent of the brilliantly graphical lines of Keith Murray's designs for Wedgwood from the '30's and onwards. Murray, New Zealand's exemplar designer.  Murray's keen sense of form, his elegantly stylised geometry, might or might not be referenced in this technically tour de force thrown off so precisely by Yoshinori Ohno.  The only tricky question with this is getting your attention back from the lovely and precise game the shadows play.

The Long Lunch and Wabi-sabi

Lunch, daily but ephemeral, is often the forgettable meal, a mid-way refuelling, a matter of fact calorificaton of self. But here we see the  end of a long lunch, long on table and long on time, slipping gracefully into the past tense, the afternoon light a soft apricot that adds some length to the perspective and a grainy softness to those elegant former hosts, the chairs.  Why is this qualityof fading, valued and named  by the Japanese as wabi sabi, so moving? Is it the integration of tonality, the quiet cohesiveness of colour, or the tug towards the irreversible nothingness, that pulls us back a moment, asking us to pivot between being and remembering?
This photo is from  the Olive Long Table Lunch at Whispering Brook,  a perfect lunch. Don't fret though, there is always next year.

Kitchen Still Life with Shadow

Why would an ordinary bowl with its strange plate chapeau evoke a sense of the great French still life painter Louise Moillon (1610-1696)? Thinking back recollected an intermediary, a fine white china bowl, shallow, handles broken off and lid long gone, itself now the same, that was a favourite place for cherries, which in their turn evoked those of Moillon. Hers, of course, were much finer offerings than these.  A homage then? Or a recollection.

Footnotes to an Autumn Tree

Last week the Pepper tree, probably Schinus spp, tree in Edwards Bay Park found itself footnoted by yellowish mushrooms. Why this tree I wonder instead of the local angophoras?  The whole fungi thing is intriguing, the idea of their labyrinthine subterranean habits, the back seat drivers of the plant world as it were, to borrow from  Sylvia Plath's fine take on the genus, they are 'the nudgers and shovers',  inheritors of earth. Now is the time to keep your eyes peeled.

Water Daubes make a Double Take

In what seems like a short lesson in Impressionism, the Water Wall, constant distorter of both the in and out sides, seems to convert St Kilda Road into something Gerhardt Richter-esque. The wall, devoid of reflections seems the natural antidote for the glass selfie.

UFO-esque in the Ensuite

This luminous apparition was, and might still be, floating and focssing itself in the ensuite of the discretely elegant Lyall Hotel in South Yarra.  It wasn't listed in the amenities guide, perhaps they might include a sentence, 'View our singularly lovely play of light, a conflux bought to you by the shaving mirror and the sun.'

Road, Ride, Roam -Wheat pastes Win the Day

 Three near poster sized black and whites, morphing into a black wall in Prahran, immortalise the lone rider, then re-contextualising the cyclist as breakaway man versus car highway hero, and then, urbane commuter. There was something more than appealing in this grainy, near elegiac set, that seems to take the wheat paste into the realm of mirrors and hyperbole. The tag inset, takes a quasi kind of punt on things satirically self-referential, or maybe just comments on ubiquity,

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Achoo and The Mailing Chute - Two Takes on the Post Box

 These are the belle lettres of letter boxes, both purely decorative and amusing . the lovely metalwork chute can be found by those with an eye for detail on the ground floor of  the Nicholson's Building Catherine Arcade, at Number 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne, on the way upstairs to visit the intensely poetic Collective Works Bookshop.

The poor paper box below, with a fit of the Achoo's was found on Brunswick Street. Already a little weathered, I suspect with this cold, it won't outlast the winter.

The World is My Oyster Mushroom

 A riot of frilled edges, a fairy cornucopia of cups - this set of stairs becomes the scene for sway of oyster mushrooms.  It is as if the underground labyrinth of fungi could no longer be kept down and this sudden set of brown and white oyster mushrooms  had to burst out along the path down to Chowder Bay. They whisper breakfast, saute,  steak and co, but hey, perhaps they are better left to their own devices?

Happy Phoenix versus Green Dragon

If a certain symmetry, perhaps a ying-yangish complementarity fosters success, or a least longevity this pair of Chinese restaurants on Malvern Road, Prahran might be a case in point. A little way off the Chapel Street bustle, these resolutely unreformed facades, suggest that the Phoenix and the Dragon might persist by the same culinary upper hand. Or it could be they have a cult following in the housing commission high-rise virtually opposite them. As some things better remain a mystery I will not say anything other than the early hour prevented me from dining in both of these fine establishments.

Gingkio biloba sneaks in

How did I overlook this funny pairing, the gingko pattern around the edge of the manhole and that single, senescent gingko leaf snicking into the frame?  Tokyo in December, where even the downcast eye is rewarded.